Heroin's Hold on the Young

By RICHARD G. JONES

Published: January 13, 2008

FOR much of the decade that Michael Devine worked the streets of New York City as a police officer, crime was dictated by the drug trade and the drug trade was dictated by the supply and unquenchable demand for heroin.

By the time he retired from the police force in 1983, heroin was losing its hold as the dominant street drug, yielding to crack cocaine. But in May 2006, heroin was making something of a comeback, and Mr. Devine -- by then a lawyer in Port Jefferson on Long Island -- found himself crossing paths with it again in a horrific way.

On his first trip home from college, Mr. Devine's 19-year-old son, Joseph, was found dead after overdosing on what the medical examiner said was a fatal ''cocktail'' of heroin, alcohol and the antianxiety medication Xanax.

Mr. Devine, 56, was not na? enough to think that his son had not consumed alcohol even though he was under-age. He has heard whispers about cocaine in his community. And his wife, Elizabeth, a nurse at a local hospital, has seen patients suffering from the harmful effects of ''pharm parties,'' in which a jar is passed around, filled with whatever pharmaceutical products were in the medicine cabinet, including drugs like Xanax.

But heroin?

''When they told me heroin was involved, I was dumbstruck,'' Mr. Devine said in a recent interview. ''I couldn't believe heroin was in this community. I had heard about cocaine in this community. But you hear heroin and you think inner cities. I couldn't grasp it.''

As law enforcement officials and crime and mortality statistics show, however, the pervasiveness of heroin use among young adults on Long Island and throughout the New York City suburbs can affect just about anyone, just about anywhere.

Last year, the National Drug Intelligence Center, which is within the Justice Department, ranked heroin alongside cocaine as the most serious drug threats in the New York area. Over the last three years, heroin seizures in New York City -- a prime entry point to the United States for suppliers from around the world -- have more than doubled, to 233 kilograms in 2006 from 114 kilograms in 2004.

While use of illicit drugs over all by 8th, 10th and 12th graders is down in recent years, according to annual surveys by University of Michigan researchers, heroin use has remained steady, with just under 1 percent of the students saying they had used it in the past year. And federal officials say heroin use is rising among one crucial demographic: young adults in suburban and rural communities, particularly those in the Northeast.

Other drugs are used by more 8th, 10th and 12th graders nationwide, although use of most drugs, like heroin, has remained fairly constant in recent years after declining early in this decade, according to the Michigan study. It said that of high school seniors surveyed in 2007, 31.7 percent said they used marijuana, 5.2 percent had tried cocaine and 5.2 percent had used OxyContin, one of the few drugs for which use had increased markedly.

Medical experts and law enforcement officials also say that as more young people in the Northeast turn to heroin, more are ending up in jail, hospital emergency rooms or the morgue.

In recent years, emergency room visits across the nation for treatment of those affected by heroin have risen sharply. In 2003, roughly 8 percent of emergency room visits related to illicit drugs involved heroin, according to the Drug Abuse Warning Network, a federal system that monitors drug-related hospital emergency department visits and deaths. In 2005, the most recent year for which comprehensive statistics are available, that figure was about 20 percent.

Federal officials say that over the last three years, roughly one of every six drug arrests in the New York area involved heroin. According to a Drug Abuse Warning Network survey, roughly a fifth of all drug-related deaths in New York and New Jersey involve heroin.

''What you often see in emergency rooms or with the police is often the indication of what's happening as far as new epidemics are concerned,'' said Gilbert J. Botvin, a drug abuse expert at Weill Medical College at Cornell University. ''I've heard much more concern in some circles about heroin use. The purity of the heroin is much higher than it was before.''

Experts say that more high-quality heroin is being put on the streets of the New York City suburbs than ever before, and at what are considered historically lower prices. Federal officials say that even the smallest amounts of heroin -- a 10-gram ''deck,'' which can cost as little as $7 on the street -- are nearly twice as potent in some cities in the region as they were four years ago.

The high-quality heroin is also reaching the United States faster than ever, because new distribution lines through Central and South America are quicker than the old Asian connections in the 1970s when heroin use was at its peak.

Those new supply lines are believed to have contributed to a spike in heroin use among young people nationwide early in the last decade. In 2000, 2.4 percent of high school seniors acknowledged having tried heroin -- the highest figures since the mid-1970s -- according to the Monitoring the Future survey of drug use conducted annually by researchers at the University of Michigan. Over the last five years, though, heroin use among seniors has held steady at about 1.5 percent.

In the New York area, though, there are indications that teenage use of heroin is more prevalent than elsewhere.